Democracy: The government where its most praised practice is also the most dangerous one (Part 3)

In my last post I briefly mentioned two ways that we could fix the voter turnout problem in Genesee County. Before we get too far into that I would like to throw in another perspective on the issue which comes from someone who is well versed in the county political system. County Commissioner John Gleason agreed to answer a few questions for me and his answers were interesting.  If we were to go back and look at the data from my first post we would see that there was an exceptionally high turnout for this part primary election; when I asked Mr. Gleason why he thought there was such a high turnout he gave this response, “Both parties had multiple candidates on the ballot.  Sanders and Trump engaged the non-voter to take part in the election process.” This was an interesting thought and I figured I should share it with you all.

Genesee County Clerk John Gleason

Now to get down to it. How do we solve this issue? Well there are two ways that I think we could solve it. The first is getting rid of representative democracy as a whole. By this I mean that we would shift to some form of democracy in which each individual (yes all 300 million of us) would vote on every aspect of our lives. 

There are two main issues with this. One, the general person would be opposed to this idea mainly 

because the system we have now has worked the past 200+ years and even though there are aspects to it that are not in the best shape currently it still works. The other issue (the bigger one in my opinion) is that people would be less engaged in this form of democracy than the one we have now. Imagine this, instead of people having to vote 4 times a year on average (assuming they vote during elections that are only state and local levels) they would have to vote almost every day on decisions that most of the time might not affect them. Because of this people would just not do their civic duty and I feel we would be in a worse off place than we are now.

The other option that I think we have to consider is the idea of incentivizing people to vote. The term incentivize here means a few things. One, it means that we give people more ways to vote so the excuses of “I cant make it to vote because I am busy” are gone. Two, we make it so people feel obligated and/or proud to vote we could do this by making voting mandatory (although not the most democratic thing to do). Three, give people a bonus for voting (besides the sticker). Lets go into a little more detail. 

In what ways could we incentivize people to begin voting in Genesee County. First, we expand the number of ways people can vote. Former Mayor Dayne Walling in my interview with him mentioned things such as adding the ability to vote online, vote by mail, and hold early election days for people that can’t make it to vote on the normal election days. These options would increase the turnout because of how flexible and available it makes voting to everyone. The second incentive could be to make voting mandatory in the County and if someone doesn’t vote there would be a punishment such as a fine. This would increase voter turnout, however, it would probably be met with a large amount of resistance. The last idea would be to give people who vote something in return for their participation. Such as if a person votes 75% of the time over a 4 year cycle then they get some form of benefit like a small tax refund or something of the sorts.

One of the Flint Arches that are iconic to the city and the County.
Since the series dealt with the county and used Flint as an example I
thought this was an appropriate tribute. 

Overall we need to fix this issue, however, it is going to take a collective attempt by the citizens and the elected officials to get this issue resolved. Thank you for reading the series and I hope you enjoyed.